1. Field of Invention
The present invention generally relates to a bus, and more particularly, to a bus for supporting plural signal line configurations and switch method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
In the current information explosionera, information process and information exchange become an inevitable course for pursuing new knowledge. Moreover, how to achieve the high speed information process and high speed information transfer has become a major objective of current technology development. Thus, the distributed process environment has been adopted by computer systems as the common choice. However, in the distributed process computer system, whether information can be exchanged speedily between each chip charged with a different mission has become a significant factor that greatly impacts the system performance. As to the control chipset of the computer motherboard, the bus between the north bridge chip and the south bridge chip demands a great amount of the information transfer. The bus data transfer performance can be improved by increasing the number of the bus signal lines, however, this method inevitably increases the manufacture cost. Since the limitation of the chip pin number, the control chips used currently all adopt the signal line configuration that supports the transfer in bi-direction, so both the north bridge chip and the south bridge chip can send and receive data. However, when the transfer direction switches, the present method has to insert turn around cycles, and under the situation when the transfer direction switches frequently, too many turn around cycles will significantly impact the transfer performance.